Jane Mayer's "The Memo" (New Yorker, 2/27/06) tells the story of Alberto Mora, former general counsel of the U.S. Navy. Mora appears to have been equipped with a degree of principle far surpassing the quota required by the average practitioner of government. He held torture to be morally despicable, and during his time with the Navy fought an uphill battle to keep government policy off the slippery slope to Abu Ghraib. Mora's efforts were subverted by William Haines, his boss at the Department of Defense, and ultimately by the Defense Secretary himself, Vice-President Cheney, and their lawyers. The torture "policy" that eventually slithered to the surface is summed up best in Donald Rumsfeld’s handwritten aside on a memo: "Carte blanche, guys."
Mora concludes that in giving torture the nod, a group of "enormously hardworking, patriotic individuals" inadvertently trashed American values. They meant well, even as they were taking a truncheon to the soul of the country they loved. As the Billie Holiday song says: "Love will make you do things that you know is wrong." Yet it seems charitable to ascribe the misdeeds of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their lawyers to misguided patriotism. Too often their love of country has resembled the self-interest Goneril and Regan tried to pass off as filial love in King Lear. The Rumsfeld-Cheneys may have trumpeted their devotion to America after September 11, but their actions have suggested a devotion primarily to power – country has played second fiddle.
And what of "hardworking"? A favorite suggestion of the Cheney-Rumsfeld school of public servantdom is that if only the cream of government were not subjected to the vinegar of rules, laws, and regulations, the governed could be blessed more regularly with its uncurdled goodness. Much of the hard work, meanwhile, goes into arranging for the governed to know less and less about what the cream is up to. One can sympathize to some extent. Government officials, like anyone else who is expected to do a good job, should be granted sufficient privacy to work as freely and creatively as possible. An urge to bend the rules or waive them altogether is understandable when it is a matter of enabling good work to be done better.
The good work the Bush Administration is so eager to be left to its own devices to do better is not readily apparent, however. Preemptive attacks? Unimaginable debt? Crass manipulation of public and press? A steady stream of inept comments, inane stunts, and insane war? Occupation? Torture? Another song lyric comes to mind, Bob Dylan's "To live outside the law you must be honest." Some people, Jesus Christ for example, have managed it and others from Thoreau to Hunter S. Thompson have given it a good run for the money. One is not convinced, however, that the Rumsfeld-Cheney type is temperamentally suited to live outside the law, much as it may yearn to. "Honest" is not the word that springs to mind when considering the architects of Carte Blanche Guys “policy."
Whether they are or are not the well-meaning, hard-working, but misguided patriots Mora says they are, one thing is now clear – they've dirtied their hands and ours, not merely with the usual day-to-day grime of politics but with the abhorrent scum of torture. ("We do not torture," the President declared last November – an assurance scholars of Bush-tongue duly parsed as a resounding confirmation that we do.) How do you wash the scum off? How do you refute the charge that the moral stink of torture competes with the moral stink of September 11 itself – the very stink we declared war on? (Lately we have been advised to settle in for the Long Stink.) The perverse "vision" of a degenerate band of zealots has been foolishly magnified by the perverse "vision" of its adversaries, prompting many these days to wonder: with adversaries like these, why would a bin Laden need allies?
One of the most powerful books ever written on the question of torture is South African J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The novel involves a provincial official known simply as The Magistrate, who turns a blind eye when Colonel Joll arrives from the capital. Joll is one of "the new men of Empire…who believes in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages." Sound familiar? And like so many of our Neo-conservative men of Empire, he can enthusiastically wrap what's left of his heart around torture. The Magistrate comes to regret his initial complicity with Joll's methods. "I should never have opened the gates to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency," he reflects. Ashamed, he takes a stand, and is brutally tortured himself. But in the book's climax when the discredited Joll is driven out, The Magistrate leans into his carriage and has the last word: "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves,” he tells Joll. “Not on others."
Such messages may be lost on the Gonerils and Regans, Cheneys and Rumsfelds, bin Ladens and al-Zawahiris. Their ideologies allow no possibility that they themselves might be in the wrong. They seem unaware of or indifferent to "the crime that is latent within us." They are unashamed of torture and unashamed to torture, to take it out on others. They are ashamed of nothing, and may go to their graves convinced they have nothing to be ashamed of. We should be grateful, meanwhile, for people like Alberto J. Mora. He may not have won the ear of his superiors, but he outranked them in decency, for whatever it’s worth. Like Cordelia, he had a heart, and his love for his country may one day ring truer than that of his twisted sisters.
February 27, 2006
